Ok, if you're reading this then the chances are you're already interested in a Hard Drive/DVD Recorder, so I won't bore you with the benefits of this over a standard DVD recorder: they should be obvious, instead I'll get straight to the review.

However, price is obviously a factor and in looking for a VCR replacement, I certainly wasn't going to pay well in excess of £300 for the two superior models, and at around £260 the MH20 met the first of my criteria: it wasn't going to break the bank.

Well, there's a definite wow factor at work as you slide this from it's box, with it's silver finish and sleek appearance. Plug it in and there's a second wow when the fascia starts to glow a very, very striking blue. So 10/10 for aesthetics. Internally there's an 80 Gigabyte Hard Drive which can hold up to 136 hours of recorded material (more on this later), and naturally, the DVD drive itself which will write to DVD-RAM, DVD-RW and DVD-R. (Note: DVD+R and DVD+RW is NOT supported) and playback pretty much anything you care to throw at it, including CD, SVCD, VCD, and MP3/JPEG (though DivX and Xvid support are notable omissions). Someone told me you could play back DVD+RW and DVD+R on this machine, but it's not a documented feature and I've never tried so feel free to experiment. It's also worth mentioning at this stage that I can't locate any region hack for this machine and I'm not paying for a mod - so for the time being it's stuck on Region 2 - this will be an issue for all those that like to import cheap Region 1's but as usual, such a hack/mod would void the warranty. Them's the breaks.

Now, I've already said the User Guide is well written (and it is) but there is an issue that had me turning the air blue till I figured this out and I'm going to share this with you so you don't have your family running for cover. It concerns Freeview. If you don't have Freeview you might want to skip this paragraph. When you first switch the MH20 on (and assuming you've got all the connections in correctly) it will automatically tune itself to the terrestrial analogue signals in your area. This is great, so-much-so that when it's done it's thing and sprung to life for the first time all the analogue channels are there waiting to be recorded. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Freeview. And whilst it would be a lie to say Freeview wasn't mentioned in the user guide, it is fair to say it only gets a passing mention and not particularly informative. I'm not even sure if my solution is the correct one (it's not according to the JVC website), but it works. I manually edited the channels by adding a 6th, calling it "free", and crucially, set the decoder setting to "on" - having initially set the L2 input to "decoder" in another part of set-up. This soon had digital TV up and running but not after a whole lot of effing and blinding. Reading that it might seem obvious but believe me, it wasn't, especially when I wasn't familiar with the menus. Because I don't watch analogue TV anymore, this set up means that I just keep the MH20 tuned to my newly created channel 6 and it will record whatever digital channel the decoder is tuned to. Because of this (and I know I'm not alone here) I'm giving serious thought to buying another decoder - one for the TV and one attached to the MH20 so that I can record one channel whilst I watch another. Bit of a step back there, but something we have to live with until decoders are incorporated as standard. Satellite and cable users seem to have more extensive coverage and shouldn't encounter the same problems.

All the menus are very straightforward - once you find out what they do! Try to find anything in the user guide about trimming a recording on the HDD and you'll struggle but the feature is there, buried in the edit menu. That's a great feature to have if you set a timer to record a programme (which is simplicity in itself incidentally) as you can "trim" the excess at the beginning and end so you're just left with the programme you want and not the detritus at either side (what's really lacking is a "stitch" function so you can "trim" out adverts and stitch the program back together again).

Wanting to test as much as I could, I've hooked up a VCR to the L2 scart input (remembering to change the setting from "decoder" to "video", and transferred some old home movies to the HDD - this worked a treat and was ridiculously simple: start recording to the HDD, press play on the VCR, wait until movie is finished; stop recording; press stop on VCR - bingo! job's a good 'un. That can then be dubbed to as many DVD's as you want safe in the knowledge that there's been no sacrifice of quality in the conversion.

Two more issues I want to raise before I return from whence I came:

Finally, and I really am scraping the barrel here mainly because I'm 99% certain this is a cable issue and nothing to do with the unit, I have noticed a very slight ghosting when the MH20 is switch on, i.e. watching any Freeview channel - reception is crystal clear, switch MH20 on and the same channel comes through it but with a very slight ghosting. I'm putting this down to shoddy cables (only the French could invent such a ridiculous socket as the scart!) and will invest in some quality scarts - hopefully that will fix it. Even then, it's only faint and I really have to look for it.